If you thought that the information companies already have about you was already an invasion of privacy, wait until they start evaluating you based solely on your face.
Imagine attending a job interview and, without saying a single word, being told that you were not selected because your face doesn’t fit in the profile. It would be presumed to be a case of discrimination and could even justify legal action.
But and if bias were not the reason? What if your face provided really useful clues about your likely job performance?
This question is at the heart of a recent study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, who sought to find out whether AI can detect trusted people only through the analysis of their facial features, reports .
This investigation is based on other studies, also ethically dubious, which assume that it is possible identify personality traits just based on facial features of a person.
The UPenn team argues that, in fact, AI can accurately predict important characteristics of people based solely on facial analysis — including metrics associated with financial successsuch as respect and trust.
To do this, the researchers used an AI system trained based on previous research into personality detection from the face, to extract five personality traits — the so-called “soft skills”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
In , recently published in SSRN, the team of researchers, led by UPenn Finance professor Marius Guenzelcollected profile photos from LinkedIn of 96,000 users with an MBA.
The team then compared the data with real career paths of users, and claims to have found an association between the personality traits identified by facial analyzes and the success achieved in the job market.
The implication, say the study authors, is that machine learning can find Correlations between facial features and real success of people.
A extraversion, for example, is the “biggest positive indicator” of remuneration, while openness to experience indicates a lower probability of receiving a high salary.
It’s a scary prospecthighlights the : an algorithm has the power to decide whether we get a job, whether we get a loan banking or whether we can rent a car, just based on how it looks.
But, as The Economist says, in a world where financial success takes precedence over everything else, companies would have a “strong incentive” to use this type of systems — of course, assuming that they do not discriminate based on characteristics protected by law.
It’s still too early to know whether any more enthusiastic technology companies will take this research and apply it in the real world, but given some of the startups that have emerged recently, it wouldn’t be surprising.
